Operator Sought for Rebuilt Brooklyn Rail Yard

By JOSEPH P. FRIED

Published: August 31, 2000

After nearly two decades of planning, New York City and State have completed the $20 million modernization of an old freight yard in Brooklyn, and the city is seeking bidders to revive the cross-harbor rail freight traffic that had largely disappeared since its heyday a half century ago.

City officials hope that the return of a vibrant cross-harbor rail freight business will reduce the roadway congestion and pollution associated with heavy truck traffic, which now carries about 80 percent of the freight coming into the city. They also hope that the yard will foster the kind of growth in rail freight traffic that will help advance a proposed rail freight tunnel under New York Harbor that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has vigorously advocated.

With most of New York City cut off by water from the mainland United States, it has a paucity of direct rail freight links to the rest of the nation. Railroads now carry only 3 percent of the half-billion tons a year of freight that flows into the city, said Seth Kaye, executive vice president for transportation in the city's Economic Development Corporation.

''We view this as a catalyst toward rebuilding the market for rail freight in New York City,'' he said yesterday, adding that his agency anticipated that 10,000 or more rail cars a year could move through the rebuilt 65th Street Rail Yard in Bay Ridge.

Michael G. Carey, the agency's president, said putting a rail car float system into operation at the yard ''could potentially divert approximately two million tons of freight a year from truck to rail and eliminate tons of air pollutants annually.''

The only rail-freight float operation now operating in the city, that of the New York Cross Harbor Railroad, sent about 4,000 cars across the harbor last year, transporting them on rail barges between 51st Street in Sunset Park on the Brooklyn waterfront, and the Greenville yard in Jersey City. It is planning to float 6,000 cars this year, said Robert Bentley, president of New York Cross Harbor.

Mr. Bentley said that his rail line would bid to operate the 65th Street yard, and that his 16-year-old company was well suited to do so, given that it has experience in land-to-barge rail operations and has equipment for such an operation on the New Jersey side.

''We're obviously concerned,'' Mr. Bentley said of the possibility that other bidders might be selected to run the 65th Street Rail Yard. The 65th Street yard is not far from his yard, which is also on a city-owned site. Mr. Kaye said the 65th Street yard was much better, its modernization having recently been finished with the completion of two rail transfer bridges, gantry-like structures that move rail cars on and off barges.

Should New York Cross Harbor be selected to operate the 65th Street yard, it is not clear how many of the 10,000 or more cars the city hopes for at 65th Street would be above the number that New York Cross Harbor now handles. Mr. Bentley said New York Cross Harbor now transports cars by barge for the three major lines that carry rail freight into and out of the city: CSX, Norfolk Southern and Canadian Pacific.

In fact, those railroads would still be providing much, if not most, of the rail car traffic moving into and out of the city by barge, even if another operator were to be selected for the 65th Street yard. But Mr. Kaye said that the city viewed use of that yard as a catalyst to spur freight shippers and rail lines to increase rail car traffic across New York Harbor.

But whatever the growth of such traffic, it is not expected to come close to what it was in New York City's heyday of cross-harbor rail freight traffic. During World War II and into the 1960's, more than 100,000 rail cars a year were transported by barge into and out of the city.

''About half was through traffic,'' Mr. Bentley said, cars carrying freight destined not for New York City and its environs but for further land rail passage to areas like upstate New York and New England. A wave of railroad bankruptcies in the 1960's and 70's was among the reasons that the rail barge traffic in the harbor severely shrank.

The 65th Street yard has been unused since before the city bought it in 1982, with the intention of recapturing some of the lost traffic. But ''the market wasn't ready for it,'' Mr. Kaye said, and city fiscal problems put off completion of the project. He also said the yard was a terminus of the Long Island Rail Road's Bay Ridge freight line, and the L.I.R.R. ''didn't focus on rail freight.''

For the last few years the New York & Atlantic Railway has been running freight service on the L.I.R.R.'s Bay Ridge tracks, and a year ago it became the first occupant of the 65th Street yard in many years under a short-term arrangement.

The city's effort to find a permanent yard operator began this week when it issued a request for proposals by potential operators. Operators also would be required to run nonbarge freight operations at the yard, including car rerouting and freight transfer between rail cars and trucks.

Photo: Work at the 65th Street Rail Yard in Brooklyn included completion of two rail transfer bridges to move rail cars on and off the barges used to cross New York Harbor. (Philip Greenberg for The New York Times)(pg. B1) Map of New York shows location of New York Harbor: The city hopes to revive cross-harbor rail freight traffic. (pg. B5)